Coordinator, Engineering and Science Research and Innovation

Peter Grütter

Peter Grütter is a professor of physics at McGill University. In June 2013, he became Chair of the Department of Physics, after serving as Associate Dean, Research and Graduate Education, for the Faculty of Science for four years.

He obtained his PhD from the University of Basel (Switzerland) in 1989 and joined McGill in 1994 after stays at IBM Research in California and Switzerland. At McGill, he was responsible for creating the Nanotools Facility in 2000 and was appointed James McGill Professor in 2006. He won an NSERC Steacie Fellowship in 2001. He has also been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, received the Rutherford Memorial Medal in Physics from the Royal Society of Canada, and awarded the Carrie Derick Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching and Supervision from McGill University. He was Director of Le Regroupement québécois sur les matériaux de pointe pointe (RQMP, a FRQNT-funded advanced materials research network) from 2007 to 2011 and Director of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIfAR) Nanoelectronics Program from 2004 to 2013.

His research interests are in developing tools, mainly based on scanning probe microscopy, and applying them to problems in nanoscience, in particular nanoelectronics. With his research group he investigates singe domain magnetic particles, quantum dots, molecules, and neurons to understand their properties and structure-function relationships with the aim of understanding how these nanoscale systems process and store energy, information and data. He is involved in numerous national, international, and industrial collaborations.